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Stalen, a novel by Yuri Buida (2017)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Russia - EKSMO
Longlisted for the 2018 National Bestseller literary award
Yuri Buida's new novel is set in 1990s and early 2000s, and gives an account of the post-Soviet life in Moscow. It's written as an imitation of a "B-movie" script: the style is impeccable, form exact, characters solid, and it's abundantly stuffed with eroticism on verge of porn, with bloody murders, and incredible adventures of the protagonist.
The author calls his novel "the picaresque adventure story." Indeed, according to the laws of genre, its narrative is written in first person as autobiographical account of its main character Stalen Igruyev (the name is, of course, a provocation, a game, as it has nothing to do with Stalin and Lenin); the protagonist is of low social class, he gets by with wit and rarely deigns to hold a job; the story is told in a series of loosely connected adventures or episodes, and there is little if any character development: his circumstances change, but they rarely result in a change of heart. Also, the story is told with a plainness of narrative language and extreme realism of detail: the protagonist recounts episodes of his biography, explaining his often unseemly deeds by a necessity to survive in a cruel world.
The plot starts off with Stalen's arrival in the post-Soviet Moscow of the early 1990s, the most stormy and cruel period of New Russian history, the first post-perestroika decade. He carries only a small amount of money, and a recommendation letter from his grandfather addressed to an influential Moscow lady of high standing. His dream is to become a famous writer. In the background is his childhood and adolescence spent in a provincial town, and several deaths that Stalen believes to be his fault. The lady turns out to be a hostess of a literary salon, an elite hetaera endowed with an amazing gift - as a result of some rare genetic mutation, her body remains young despite her age. At this point, begins a series of erotic experiences entwined with teaching of writing skills, and gradual improvement of Stalen's living conditions. A talented young man writes what he is told to, sleeps with whom he is commanded, and survives to the best of his abilities.
Buida masterfully merges real facts with invented circumstances. His narrative constantly balances on verge of decency, it shocks, captivates, and to certain extent is reminiscent of Beigbeder's 9.99. The novel is a multi-layered game exploring a psychological (and sometimes psychiatric) jungle of human nature. It deals with a multitude of philosophical issues, including that of existence, through the medium of adventure story, crime, erotica, thriller, suspense, and bloody trash.
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The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1998)
Rights sold: France - Gallimard, Germany - Luchterhand, Greece - Kastaniotis, Italy - Jaca Book, the Netherlands - De Arbeiderspers, Norway - Cappelen Damm, Romania - POLIROM, Russia - Vagrius, Slovenia - Cankarjeva založba, Turkey - Everest
Underground chronicles, in first-person narrative, a homeless 50-something nonwriting writer’s wanderings through mental and physical corridors that he compares to life itself. Petrovich apartment-sits for residents of a dormitory-like building, drinks quite a bit, and twice commits murder. The first half of this 550-page book felt like baggy, linked, almost stream-of-consciousness stories, but the second half read like a suspenseful and emotional novel, in chapters. I got so caught up in the end that I had a strange, dazed feeling when I finished.
Makanin builds much of Underground around references to Russian literature, which Petrovich claims as a key value, though I don’t seem to recall him reading much. The title refers to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground plus Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Petrovich certainly is an underground, intelligentsia, superfluous poster guy for the perestroika era, someone with a lot of “I” but no set home, job, or apparent value to society. Makanin opens the book with an epigraph from Lermontov, the famous line saying that his character’s portrait is a composite.
Petrovich likens himself and an old friend – a writer-double who is successful in the West – to a fable about a wolf with its freedom and a well-fed dog wearing a collar. Petrovich, of course, is the free wolf, and a proud Undergrounder, too. According to Petrovich, “The Underground is society’s subconscious.” Petrovich traces the Underground and his own intellectual heritage to Russia’s hermit monks, émigrés, and dissidents. Makanin also used an underground theme in Escape Hatch: a man crawls through a hole between above- and below-ground worlds.
Petrovich’s preference for the Underground fits with Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he writes that the dominant aspect of the Underground Man is self-consciousness. Petrovich’s goal, even in killing, is always to preserve his “I”, which he also calls his "living place".
The combination of gritty, naturalistic details and literariness makes the book feel hyperreal and symbolic or allegorical. Petrovich’s breakdown in a homeless shelter is particularly scary in both real and symbolic ways, with its monosyllabic shrieks, Vietnamese neighbors jumping on him, and extreme existential distress.
Petrovich ends up in the same hospital as his brother Venya, another double of sorts. Venya is an artist who represents the brothers’ childhood; he has spent most of his adult life in the hospital and reverts to childhood behaviors when he has a day out. More allusions? The name Venya reminded me of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, with its introspection and drinking, and it may be unintentional, but one of the hospital episodes churned up distant memories of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another: the chapter on Venya’s day of freedom refers to the title One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Lisa Hyden,
read full review here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2009/09/wandering-lifes-corridors-in-makanins.html
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